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Friday, October 24, 2014

You, Me and Gordon

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You, Me and Gordon

Stuart Rathbone

Gordon Childe holds a peculiar
place in the pantheon of great archaeologists. His popularity and reputation
remain exceptionally high and, despite much of his work being outdated, the
sheer scope of his scholarship continues to impress. His personality also has
appealing aspects, the lovable rogue, the Australian in Edinburgh and London,
the Communist, the Marxist, the Socialist (or however we choose to peg him)
running loose in the uptight world of British Academia. Although Childe was rather
neglected during the 20 years following his death, by the 1980’s he had
re-emerged into the archaeological mainstream and the sheer quantity of
bibliographic articles that have discussed his life and works attests to his
continuing appeal.

I would strongly suspect that
Childe’s first book is the one that is least read by archaeologists today, and
for good reason. How Labour Governs: A study of worker’s representation inAustralia (1923) is a critical account of the rise, successes and failings of
the Australian Labor Party between 1890 and 1920, and frankly it just isn’t
that relevant to most archaeological research. The most likely exception being
for those working in Antipodean Industrial Archaeology where it may be of some interest
in setting the social background to their fieldwork1. Conor McHale has recently produced
a fabulous recruitment poster for the Irish Archaeological Branch of the UniteUnion that features an illustration of Gordon Childe, and that poster was the
spur for this short article which considers the relevance of Childe’s early
political writing to the modern profession of contract archaeology in Ireland.

How
Labour Governs is not a simple historical account of the development of
the Australian Labour party. The first half of the book is dedicated to a
detailed account of the actions of the Labour Party as a parliamentary
organisation that was dominated by;

“politicians [who] could defy the clearly expressed will of the
bulk of their supporters and [persisted] in so doing in spite of the decisions
of Conference.”

It uses the Australian
Labour Party as a case study to examine the problem of how a working class
labour movement can attain political power without becoming subject to an
autocratic and unrepresentative cabal of politicians and/or bureaucrats. It is
clear Childe considered that in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries the Australian Labour Party failed dramatically to resolve this issue.

The second half of the
book begins with a description of the origins of unions in Australia prior to the
1850’s, with subsequent sections detailing the different types of unions that
existed, the need for specific types of organisation adapted to the needs of
the peculiarities of the Australian job market, and the various unsuccessful
attempts to bind the separate unions into a nationwide organisation that could
be more easily controlled by the parliamentary Labour Party.

The final chapters deal
with the rise, fall and subsequent influence of the Industrial Workers of the World.
This radical and revolutionary union was founded in America in 1905 and I.W.W.
groups were established in Australia by 1907, with an official charter being
granted in 1911. Childe declares confidently that;

“The most momentous event in the political industrial history of
Australian labour, since the historic decision in favour of political action in
1890, was the establishment of locals of the I.W.W. Nobody has exercised a more
profound influence on the whole outlook of labour in Australia.”

The I.W.W. believed that the workers should confront their
employers directly, through strikes, protests and sabotage and they had little
interest in engaging with existing political structures as they sought to form
‘the structure of the new
society within the shell of the old’. Childe had already established why such an approach would find
favour with the rank and file of the existing Labour movement who had been
given ample reason to be disillusioned with their own representative politicians
and he clearly had some sympathy with the organisation. The I.W.W. newspaper
Direct Action is referred to repeatedly as “splendid”
and “brilliant” whilst the
legislation that outlawed the organisation is described as “horrendous”. That Childe was prepared to
comment favourably on any aspects of I.W.W. activity in a text published in
1923 is rather astonishing, especially considering that he is quite frank about
the later stages of I.W.W. activity which included the assassination of a
police officer and a campaign of arson.

The final two chapters end with a discussion of the failed general
strike of 1917, which occurred after the I.W.W. had been illegalised and
disbanded, the subsequent attempts to establish One Big Union and the resistance
to that movement that was spearheaded by the Australian Workers Union. The
general strike and the incorporation of all workers organisations into a single
union were the I.W.W.’s preferred mechanism for the actual revolution, but
Childe expresses his opinion that without the “scientific” leadership offered by the I.W.W. the general strike
was ultimately counterproductive. His concluding remarks describe his scepticism
that the One Big Union would amount to anything of much worth after it’s
reformulation following the conflicts with the A.W.U. and in the absence of
I.W.W. leadership;

“While the One Big Union may be realised it
will have to sacrifice its revolutionary idealism, and will degenerate into
that state of soulless mechanism which seems to come over all Labour activities
in the hour of their apparent triumph.”

But what on earth has any of this got to do with you? Good
question. This year (2014) a group of archaeologists saw the completion of the first
stage in an ambitious plan to unionise the archaeological work force in
Ireland. On Saturday the 7th of June the Archaeological Branch of
Unite, was officially formed at a meeting in the unions offices in Dublin.
There have been two further meetings over the summer and the forth meeting is
scheduled for the 8th of November.

Now I’ve joined the Union. This may not seem like a particularly
remarkable statement, but for me personally, it really is. I am not a ‘joiner-inner’.
In normal circumstances I’m more likely to be found standing on the edges
mumbling my disapproval through a cloud of cigarette smoke. I think I joined a
Rugby club when I was 7, the Prehistoric Society when I was 23 and Xtra-Vision
back when renting DVD’s was something we still did. That’s about it as far as I
know, the first incidence of me being a member ended when I was 12 and the
other two don’t require me to actually do anything. And yet I’ve joined an actual
Union. Like adults do. Shit!

So what’s it all about then? Well firstly it’s about getting a
Registered Employment Agreement for the contract archaeological sector in
Ireland. An R.E.A. is a clever mechanism that allows for a Union representing a
particular industry to negotiate with a representative group of employers to
establish an agreed set of pay rates for different employment grades within
that industry. Once the levels of pay and the definitions of grades are agreed
a submission is made to the Labour Courts. If the Labour Courts agree that the
Union is representing a significant proportion of the Industry, and the
employers involved in the negotiation are representative of the industry as a
whole, it is passed on to the legislature who make the agreement legally
binding for the entire industry. This process provides guarantees that staff
will be paid according to the rates and grades set out in the R.E.A. and that
the employers will be able to pay their staff accordingly without the fear that
competitors may ignore the R.E.A. and be able to submit more attractive tenders
based on lower wages.

Following the publication of the Institute of Archaeologists of
Ireland’s ‘working
group for the review of pay rates’ report earlier this year, and the
subsequent ‘Discovering
the Archaeologists of Europe 2012-14’ report, we can be fairly certain
about where the contract archaeology sector currently stands. Do you remember
the film Highlander?
It’s been the corporate equivalent of that. One after another renowned firms,
good companies with massive resources of skills and knowhow, have folded under
the pressure of chasing ever slimmer margins on ever tighter tenders. Employment
levels have fallen massively, as have wages for the surviving staff.

So what about Gordon? Well I’m wary of putting words into a dead
man’s mouth, but seeing as Conor has already enlisted the support of his ghost,
I think there are some points that can be made without getting into controversial
territory. Firstly this is not the late 1800’s or the early 1900’s. We are not
facing the sort of genuine struggles for survival that the lowest paid workers
were faced with at the turn of the previous century. Secondly there simply was no contract
archaeology sector in Childe’s time. That archaeological work would ever take
place at the sort of scale seen during the Irish boom would have been
inconceivable, and even when pre development work did take place, perhaps most
impressively Grime’s
excavation campaign between 1939 and 1945 in advance of war constructions,
it involved a small number of professional archaeologists supervising a large
crew of labourers.

When Childe moved to Britain for the second time, in the early
1920’s, his initial employment was in a political role and he bounced around
between academic and political jobs for several years before settling on
academia in 1927. Throughout his academic career he remained politically
active, serving on the editorial board of two important Marxist Journals and as
a founding member and subsequent Executive Committee member of the Edinburgh
branch of the Association of Scientific Workers. As Robin Gollan put it in his
review of the 1963 reprint of How Labour Governs for the journal Labour History,
“always, as scholar and citizen, Gordon Childe remained a man of the
left, who believed in the possibility of a society both rational and good.”

I think he would be
horrified at the mess we’ve got ourselves into as an emergent profession. And I
think there are some striking similarities between the problems he was writing
about 100 years ago and the problems we are facing as an industry today. The
principle industries involved in early 20th century unions in Australia
were all recent developments that lacked traditional graded career structures,
and the ‘bush’ workers at the centre of the matter were itinerant low paid
workers that lacked representation and had no job security. How far removed is
the situation of Site Assistants and Supervisors from this passage of Childe’s describing
the predicament of the bush worker?

“He lives from hand to mouth
with the spectre of unemployment ever at his side, deprived of the solaces and distractions
provided cheaply in a big city. He has no incentive to thrift, for his position
is too precarious; the nomadic life forced upon him prevents the formation of
home ties and precludes the possibility of settling down close to a regular
job. To such it seems really more sensible to have a good time when they have
money than to hoard savings that are sure to be exhausted as soon as the period
of slackness comes round, and cannot well be turned to the same channels as
those in which the more fortunate class of toiler can invest them. At the same time
the nomadic life fosters a spirit of hardihood and self reliance which would
not be found in a mere slum proletariat.”

I would suggest that
there are some rather obvious similarities. I have commented
before on how many times I have relocated since becoming a professional
archaeologist, how the constant movement and dislocation becomes extremely wearisome,
how constantly being separated from friends and family is an unrecognised
hardship and how the general lack of money leads to a ‘fuck it anyway’ attitude
towards drinking and drug taking. This seems to be the same complaint Childe is
making that the poor conditions of employment affect all aspects of life, and
these negative effects extend well beyond simple financial tallies.

Whilst we can point to some
general similarities there are clearly some significant differences must be
considered too. The Preamble to the I.W.W. Constitution starts with one of the most
notorious passages in the history of left wing political writing;

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in
common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among
millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have
all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on
until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the
earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.”

Impressive sentiments but not
ones that are particularly applicable to our current situation. Our employers certainly
can’t be compared to the early 20th century capitalists such as the
notorious Copper bosses of Salt
Lake City or Calumet
Michigan, or the Australian ranch owners, who as Childe himself points out,
were at least a noticeably less murderous lot than their American counterparts.
In contrast we have many things in common with our employers, we mostly share
similar social backgrounds, similar educational experiences and at the very
least we have a common interest in archaeology.

Surely the employers would be
happy to pay the rates set out in the recent I.A.I. report if they could be certain
that doing so would not be harmful to the businesses they have worked hard to
create. And that’s the key to the R.E.A.’s; once in place it would be illegal
for any firm to pay under the agreed rates and a company found doing so would
have to answer to the Labour Courts and would need to present a very
compelling case for why they were not abiding by the R.E.A. The companies that
will succeed if an R.E.A. is enacted will be those who can devise the most
efficient programs of work, those that have retained the most experienced and
hard working excavation teams and those which make the best use of new
technologies as they become available. That seems a reasonable basis on which a
competitive and profitable industry can be run.

I suspect Mr Childe would be firmly
in favour of our attempts at organising industrially. When he wrote How Labour
Governs he was clearly rather radically inclined. The Childe of the 1920’s
would perhaps think that our attempts to resolve our industrial problems are
terribly mild mannered, too restricted in our scope and not nearly ambitious
enough! Throughout his career Childe continually refined and developed his
thoughts on archaeology. Whilst he never wrote a second large tract on
industrial relations a series of letters and a paper given on his return to
Australia in 1957 allow us to trace a similar progression in his political
thought. Some authors have attempted to portray Childe as having abandoned his
socialist principles by the mid 1950’s, having become disillusioned with
socialism in general and communisim in particular. Certainly his return to
Australia caused him to reflect on the current state of that country. Second
hand accounts of a lecture he gave to the Australian Book Society in September
1957 have been much discussed over the years, but a published version did not surface
until 1990.In ‘Australia
today is far from a Socialist Country’ he seems to be saying that
the intellectualculture in Australia wasn't
to his personal taste, but he is far from being critical of Australian society.
In fact he seems rather impressed, and if the newly affluent masses were more
interested in having a good time than more cerebral pursuits, that was their
business, not his. He has a similarly pragmatic response to the apparent lack
of socialism. He found a prosperous society where some of the main goals of
socialism had been achieved, i.e. wealth was reasonably equally distributed and
most people had a decent standard of living. If it had been done without moving
into proper State sponsored socialism, so be it. At no point does he
claim that earlier class struggles hadnot
been influential and important, although the tone of the piece suggests he was
surprised at how positively society had been remodelled without the guidance of
the radical left. He certainly couldn't have been as alienated from his former
allies in the Labour movement as is sometimes suggested; he stayed withBert
Evettthe then leader of the Australian Labour Party whilst in
Sidney and before leaving Britain he had
apparently been planning to present a new edition of Engel's’Origins
of the Family’ with one of the leading figures in British Communism,Rajani
Palme Dutt. A lot of things had clearly changed in
Childe’s thinking since writing How Labour Governs, but the world had changed
dramatically too. Perhaps the older more pragmatic Childe would have been much
more sympathetic to our mild cooperative attitude than the younger and more confrontational
Childe of the 1920’s. Much has been made, perhaps unfairly given his terminal
intentions, of a comment from a private correspondence claiming he had “lost
[his] old ideals” by the end of his life. I wonder whether a visit to
‘NAMAland’, other similarly screwed up Western Economies like Portugal, Spain
and Greece, would have triggered another re-assessment? What would he make of
those countires in the developing world where 50 years of ‘globalism’ can only
be seen as an undisputed disaster, or to the success stories like India where a
whole hearted commitment to capitalim is triggering phenomenal social changes,
many of which are far from positive? Of course we will never know, but movements
like ‘Occupy’ and the G8 Protests suggest a growing awareness that there needs
to be a counter balances introduced to the free market model. Noam Chomsky has
repeatedly pointed out the way to organise collectively has long been
established, and that unionisation is the key to individuals being able to
co-operate effectively in order to improve their own situations.

As for the Archaeology Branch of
Unite, well we certainly don’t want to see the companies crushed and we genuinely
don’t want an antagonistic relationships with them. Actually we would like to
see the companies move back into more stable financial situations, where their
long term future is safe guarded. We want to see the companies able to
undertake new jobs to the same the excellent standards they were achieving
during the boom years and we want them to be around to complete the process of
turning previously excavated sites into interesting publications and properly
curated archives.At the same time we want to see
the staff finally getting treated as the hard working professionals they undoubtedly
are, rather than as some horrible hybrids of junior academics and immigrant fruit
pickers created by some erstwhile Dr Moreau
in a forbidden basement below the National Monuments Service. The pool of
experienced excavation staff that had built up in Ireland during the boom is
now sadly diminished. We know many of our former colleagues are away in other
countries using the skills and experience gained here to protect and recover
the archaeology of their new homes. We also know that many who have remained in
Ireland have retrained and, having experienced employment under less deranged
conditions, will not be returning to archaeology without a seriously attractive
incentive.As we move out of the recession
we will have to rebuild the pool of skilled workers, but this time around we
must have more to offer than over priced rented rooms in shitty houses, short
term contracts and a few Euro’s a week above the minimum wage. Until we achieve
these things we cannot claim to have a mature profession and Ireland will not
have the archaeological organisations its fantastic heritage deserves.

If
you are working as an archaeologist, were an archaeologist and might be an
archaeologist again in the future or are just starting out in a career in
archaeology please consider joining the Archaeological Branch of Unite and help us help create a
structure that finally meets our aspirations for this unique and important profession.

I would like to thank Conor
McHale for allowing me to accompany this article with his brilliant
illustrations. Dr Iain Stuart, the aforementioned Australian Industrial
Archaeologist, discussed with me at length some of his feelings about Childe’s
work and legacy, and the various accounts that have been written about him
which have attempted to portray Childe in different lights. I am really grateful
for this assistance particularly as it was offered whilst Iain was up to his
neck in the tail end of a large and complex excavation.

[1]
I checked with the only Australian Industrial Archaeologist I actually know and
he had read it, making it a 100% confirmation in a sample size of one. Go
science Stu!